Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Just War

On 28 February, American Neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser posted to his blog a short piece with the title “The U.S. war on Iran is manifestly unjust”.  In this piece he demonstrated that the war on Iran does not meet the criteria to be considered just according to classical Catholic just war theory, focusing on the requirements that there be a just cause and showing that the reasons put forth by the White House for the actions against Iran do not make for a genuine casus belli.  He also briefly talked about the war’s not meeting the requirement that it be conducted under lawful authority because by the terms of American constitutional law the authority to wage war belongs to Congress and not the president.

 

Roman Patriarch Leo XIV is clearly of the same opinion as Feser on this matter.  Some others of the Roman communion who hold to just war theory are less certain.  Among these is R. R. (“Rusty”) Reno, editor of First Things. His argument that it is “unwise to issue confident moral judgments about Operation Epic Fury” was posted on 3 March, three days after Feser’s.  Feser has just contributed a piece to First Things entitled “Does Just War Doctrine Require Moral Certainty?”  In response to those like Reno who disagreed with him, he argues for an affirmative answer to the question asked in his title.  “What has long been the standard teaching in the Catholic just war tradition”, he writes, “is that the probability of a war’s being just is not good enough. The case for the justice of a proposed war must be morally certain. Otherwise, it is morally wrong to initiate the conflict.”  Note his use of the illustration of a hunter shooting into the bush.  Unless the hunter is certain there is no person hiding in or behind the bush that he might hit, to shoot is a reckless and morally wrong act.  The same illustration has been used for decades to answer the argument  that we don’t know when a fetus becomes a person made by those who think women should have the right to murder their unborn offspring.

 

I agree with Feser (and Leo XIV) on this matter.  I wish to point out, however, that he has been arguing mostly the one aspect of the just war question, that of jus ad bellum or when is it just to go to war.  There is also the aspect of jus in bello or what is the right manner in which to conduct war.  These aspects are not independent of each other.  If a war cannot be fought in a manner that is jus in bello then it can never be jus ad bellum.

 

This is often avoided in contemporary discussions of just war because of the uncomfortable question it raises of whether Modern developments in the technology of war have made a jus ad bellum war a practical impossibility.

 

The rules of just war theory or doctrine were hammered out at a time when wars were fought very differently from how they are fought today.  A king who went to war with another kingdom would be expected either to lead the troops into battle himself or delegate the task to his sons, brothers, or other close relatives.  Democratically elected politicians, by contrast, do not fight in the wars for which they vote and are notorious for protecting their own children from conscription.   How did Black Sabbath put it again?  “Politicians hide themselves away/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to the poor.” (1)

 

Furthermore, when St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al., were drawing out the principles of just war from Scripture, moral philosophy/theology and reason, those who did the actual fighting and killing in war, generally had to see the people they were killing in order to do so.  This meant, of course, that they were also putting their own lives in jeopardy by going to war.  This was most obviously the case with combat involving swords and other weapons that could not kill beyond the range of the slightly extended arm-length they provided, but even with longer-distance weapons such as bows and arrows, catapults, and cannons you had to see what you were aiming at with your own eyes.

 

This was the way war was fought for most of human history.  Now think of the contrast with today.  Airplanes were first used in combat in World War I.  With World War II, the use of these machines to drop high explosive bombs that could kill large numbers of unseen non-combatants became normative.  By the end of that war, the Americans had developed the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb, which they dropped on two Japanese cities killing about 120, 000 people instantly with the death toll growing to about twice that amount by the end of the year due to radiation poisoning and other such injuries.  Mercifully, their use did not become normative, especially since the development of this monstrous technology after the war has exponentially increased its destructive power to the point where it could eliminate humanity and all other life on earth.  In 1957, the Soviet Union conducted the first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and two years later both the Americans and the Soviets had operational ICBM systems in place. By the 1970s, advanced guidance systems that used computers and lasers to direct bombs to their targets were in common use (this evolved out of technology that in a very early stage of development both the Americans and the Nazis had during World War II).  Today, cities can be reduced to rubble and thousands of non-combatants instantly killed, totally unseen by the person who does the destroying and killing with the push of a button, half a world away.

 

This, which, by the way, is what “progress” looks like, a fact which when it sinks in should be sufficient to make a reactionary out of any sane person, was not merely a series of changes to the tools of war.  It changed the very nature of war and in such a way as to raise the question of whether war fought in this manner and with these tools can ever be just.

 

It is a difficult question to answer, not least because however these changes have affected the nature and justice of war, they have not affected in the slightest its necessity.   If a hostile power attacks and invades your country this creates the necessity of your going to war defensively to stop them (blithering rubbish to the contrary from Mennonites, Quakers, and Gandhi be hanged).  To say that something is necessary, however, is not to say that it is just, since necessity and justice are two very different things. If we set the difference between necessity and justice aside and take the position that all defensive wars are just, note that this would obviously not justify the actions of the United States and Israel.

 

In popular American culture the demands of classical just war theory have largely been by-passed by a very different way of thinking about martial ethics.  In this way of thinking, it does not matter so much that a war have a valid casus belli, that it be a means of last resort, that the good that it accomplishes or at least tries to accomplish outweighs the death and destruction it causes and that non-combatants not be made into targets.  What matters is that “we” (the ones going to war) are the “good guys” and that “they” (the ones we are going to war with) are the “bad guys.”

 

This way of looking at things is so puerile if not infantile that it would scarcely be worth addressing if it were not so widespread in the United States (and other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom that have had the misfortune of being inundated with American pop culture) and so clearly the predominant way of thinking among those who started this war and its chief apologists.  This is, of course, the way superhero comic books and Hollywood movies tend to portray things and it can hardly be a coincidence that these started to become the staples of American pop culture that they are today around the same time as the rapid advancement of American military technology.  Hollywood and DC (2) cannot be blamed for creating this thinking, however much they may have helped popularize it, because it had been part of the American mindset long before World War II.

 

Indeed, I maintain that it can be traced back to the Calvinism that was the root of Yankee culture.  Now in this instance I am not using the word “Yankee” in the sense it normally has in my country or, for that matter, anywhere else outside of the United States, i.e., as a synonym for “American.”  I am using it rather to refer to the culture of the American northeast which developed out of the colonies settled by Puritans.  In the American Internecine War (1861-1865) this culture went to war with its chief rival, the more traditional and agrarian culture of the American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line which had developed out of colonies that were not so Puritan in nature.  It thoroughly defeated its rival and has dominated American culture on the national level ever since. (3)  By this point in time Yankee culture had become secularized, but it was still at heart a secular Calvinism.

 

While this most often comes up in the context of tracing American capitalism back to the Protestant (more specifically Calvinist) work ethic (4) or of Southern traditionalist conservatives pointing out the deleterious effects of the North’s victory on American society as a whole (5), I believe that it can be shown to also be the source of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset of American culture. 

 

The doctrine that most sets Calvinism apart from other Christians, including other Protestants, is its doctrine of double predestination and election.   This might seem to be an unlikely source of dividing people into “good guys” and “bad guys” since it is closely related in Calvinist theology to what seems at first glance to be the strongest possible affirmation of the orthodox Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, i.e., that all of Adam’s descendants are tainted with the sin that infected human nature in the Fall and are therefore utterly dependent upon the grace and mercy of God.  In Calvinist theology, especially as formulated against Arminianism (a dissenting subcategory of Calvinism that stresses free will) this is stated as Total Depravity.  From the body of humanity so totally depraved by Original Sin, the doctrine of double predestination states, God in eternity past selected some upon whom to pour His mercy and grace and to bring to final salvation and chose others upon whom to pour His wrath and to punish eternally basing the selection entirely upon His Own pleasure rather than upon anything within the “elect” and the “reprobate” that might distinguish them from each other.

 

How this idea became secularized into the American “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset may already be apparent.  To make it clearer I will briefly show how the Calvinist doctrine differs from Christian orthodoxy.  Original Sin is sound, orthodox doctrine, taken directly from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Pelagianism (that Adam’s sin isn’t inherited and that people can be righteous before God without His grace) and Semi-Pelagianism (that God’s grace is required for salvation, but that man can make the first step towards God) are both heresies, condemned as such by the universal Church.  This means that all people are sinners (Rom. 3:23).  The division of mankind into the righteous (those cleansed of sin and made righteous before God by His grace given to man in Jesus Christ) and the wicked (those who finally and incurably reject the grace of God) is not something that took place in eternity past but something that will take place on the Last Day.   Until then, God does indeed have those He has “chosen”, who have received His grace, but unlike in the Calvinist concept of the “elect” in orthodox theology being chosen by God does not mean selected to be an elite few who are given God’s grace to enjoy among themselves but being selected to receive His grace that they may assist in bringing it to others.   Think of God’s words to Abra(ha)m the very first time He spoke to him.  “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3)  Far too many people read these verses as if the emphasis was on the words that I did not highlight with italics.  For Abraham, being chosen by God did not mean that he was the exclusive recipient of God’s favour and blessing but that he was a vessel through which it was to flow to everyone else. (6)

By contrast, the Calvinist view of election is that those chosen by God are chosen to be the sole and exclusive recipients of His saving grace and mercy.  In its strictest form, defined by the canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) rather than the Institutes of John Calvin himself, Calvinism teaches that God gave Jesus Christ only to His elect and that Jesus died only for the elect, a doctrine that most Christians rightly regard as blasphemous and heretical.  In Calvinism, the numbers of the elect and reprobate have been fixed from eternity past.  One is either “elect” or “reprobate”, this can never change, and it is in no way based on anything one does.  This is the doctrine of John Winthrop and his followers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who envisioned what would become America as a Puritan “city on a hill” even as the spirit of the Modern Age, the spirit of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him, had already infested his fellow Puritans in England who not long thereafter would, in complete violation of the Scriptural injunctions of SS Peter and Paul, wage what would ultimately be a regicidal war against King Charles I and lay the foundation for the twin evil doctrines of the Modern Age, liberalism (of which Americanism is a variety) and progressivism or leftism (of which Communism is a variety). It is the clear ancestor of the American idea that in war there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, their “goodness” and “badness” being who they are and not so much what they do, a notion that conveniently allows traditional Christian doctrine as to when it is right to go to war and how war can be rightly conducted to be bypassed.

 

That, of course, is the danger of this “good guys” versus “bad guys” approach to war.  The old rules of just war doctrine were carefully thought out to limit when wars can be fought and how they can be fought so as to limit the destruction and death wrought by war.  “Good guys” versus “bad guys”, however, is not such a limiting doctrine.  To the contrary, its tendency is to give carte blanche to the “good guys” when it comes to defeating the “bad guys.”  Look at how that has played out in American history.  In the American Internecine War, the North invaded the South and waged total war against those who from their own stated perspective they regarded as still their brethren and fellow countrymen.  Total war is always unjust by the standards of traditional Christian just war doctrine.  In World War II, FDR unilaterally – he did not inform Sir Winston Churchill of it in advance, and Churchill who had a lot more sense than Roosevelt recognized it to be a bad move although he was forced to go along with FDR’s press release – declared that the Allies would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, a stupid declaration that could only ever have had the result of prolonging the war and increasing rather than limiting its destructiveness.  At the end of that war Truman unconscionably ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though, contrary to the lies that are told today to justify this action, he knew that Japan was already willing to negotiate a surrender to General MacArthur.  The current head of the United States in an ill-thought out social media rant against Leo XIV said, among other things, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”  Would it not be more sensible to say that the only country that has ever committed the atrocity of using nuclear weapons in war is the country that should not be trusted with having them?

 

The “good guy” versus “bad guy” mentality leads those who hold it to regard earthly wars as microcosmic versions of a cosmic level struggle between good and evil.  Christians are forbidden to think this way (Eph. 6:12).  There may be a surface level resemblance between this idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and the Christian teaching that an angel started a rebellion against God in the spiritual realm, which was brought to earth when Adam and Eve were tempted and fell, but the resemblance does not go much deeper than this.  It is much closer to Eastern dualistic concepts which, when they made their way into the Church in the early centuries through false teachers like Mani, were rejected as heresy.  Christianity – sound, orthodox, Christianity that is – does not teach that good and evil are two opposing forces, the struggle between which basically defines the universe and life within it.  Christianity teaches that there is One God, Who is Good, that other than God, everything that exists has been created by God Who created it good and pronounced it good, that the evil that became present in Creation when Satan and then man used the good gift that is their free will to rebel against God is present not as some force or power or thing that is equal and opposite to goodness, but only in the same way that a hole is present in a wall.

 

Classical just war doctrine, carefully formulated by the Church’s best doctors and theologians from Scriptural principles and moral philosophy to limit the destructive potential of war is really the only option for orthodox Christians.  A pacifism that tells you not merely to turn the cheek to the ἐχθροί (personal enemies) you are commanded to love but to allow the πολέμῐοι (military enemies) of your country to conquer, enslave or kill your family, neighbours and countrymen without fighting back is utterly vile and not to be regarded as a valid option.  The recipe for escalating rather than limiting endless numbers of wars that is the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset must also be rejected as repugnant.  This leaves us with classical just war doctrine, of which the United States’ current war against Iran fails all the tests. 

 

Unless the United States can figure out a way to fight a war without using technology that enables them to kill people they can’t see in large numbers from a safe distance far away and to dismiss the civilian casualties as “collateral damage” it is doubtful that any war she fights can ever be considered just again.

 

 (1)   Ozzy Osbourne, Terence Michael Butler, William T. Ward, F. Frank Iommi, “War Pigs”, 1970.

(2)   Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were introduced in 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively.  Although Timely introduced Captain America in 1940, it was not until 1961 when the company rebranded as Marvel and Editor-in-chief Stan Lee working with Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, soon to be followed by Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men that it became the big player in the superhero comics market.

(3)   See Clyde N. Wilson, The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, (Columbia SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2016). 

(4)   Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated from 1905 German edition by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930).

(5)   Note 3, vide supra, and also The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York & London: Harper and Bros, 1930) which is still in print from Louisiana State University Press and pretty much any book by M. E. Bradford.

(6)  The Calvinist view of election is not the only one that could stand correction from this passage.  Unlike previous American military escapades in the Middle East, the current war against Iran has little international support.  The United States’ most conspicuous ally in this war is Israel.  Much of the internal support for the war in the United States has come from Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, who have a particular version of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset in which Israel is always the “good guy” in a Middle East conflict regardless of the circumstances and her neighbour is always the “bad guy”.

 

This is because the present day state of Israel shares the same name as the people of God in the Old Testament and these evangelicals believe that the Genesis 12 passage – the parts not highlighted in the quotation in the text of this essay – require that Christians give unconditional support to the present day state. 

 

This is an absurd conclusion.  It starts from an interpretation of Genesis 12 that like the Calvinist, regards God’s choosing or electing as being for the sake of the chosen or elect rather than for everyone.  In this case it is the interpretation that this passage, subsequent passages like it, and basically the whole of Old Testament history was all about creating an ethnic group which would enjoy God’s special favour.  The New Testament does not allow for this interpretation.  Galatians 3:16 clearly states that the Seed to Whom the promises to Abraham pertain is Christ.  Since everyone who believes in Christ is united to Christ and therefore in Christ the promises are available to everyone through faith in Jesus Christ.  They are only available through such faith, not through biological descent from Abraham. 

 

This is the clear teaching of the passage which, ironically, those who argue otherwise, claim as their principal proof text.  This passage, which interestingly follows the two chapters which Calvinists like to twist to support their view of election, is Romans 11.  In this chapter Israel, the people of God, is likened to an olive true.  Biological descendants of ancient Israel are described as “natural branches” of the tree. “Natural branches” who do not believe in Jesus Christ are cut out of the tree for their unbelief. Gentiles (from the Latin word for “nation” this is used to mean non-Jews) who believe in Jesus Christ are “wild branches” which are grafted in by faith.  The cut off “natural branches” can be grafted back in again if they believe.  Therefore, those who are in the olive tree that is the true Israel of both Testaments are believing (in Jesus Christ) Jews and believing Gentiles.  Believing Jews and Gentiles, however, make up the Catholic (universal) Church.  Clearly, therefore, this passage cannot support the claim that the Israel of God is a biological nation distinct from the Church which is the fundamental claim of the rubbish theology that underlies the “Christian Zionist” position. 

 

Those who cling to this theology, which, not coincidentally, is primarily to be found in the United States, will no doubt scream “Replacement Theology” at having this obvious truth pointed out, much like how Calvinists scream “Arminian” at anyone who does not accept their claim that God doesn’t love everyone and that Jesus died only for the elect, but this is akin to liberals screaming “racist” at anyone who disagrees with them.  “Replacement theology” would say either that the “wild branches” were grafted in to replace the “natural branches” or that a “wild olive tree” was substituted for the “natural olive tree” but neither of these is the case (that the “wild branches” are not “replacements” of the “natural branches” is evident from the fact that the “natural branches” can be grafted back in).  This is rather “Continuation theology”, that Israel, the olive tree, continues into the Church.   The only “replacement” is the “replacement” of the Old Covenant with the New, a “replacement” that is actually a “fulfillment” of the promises of the Old Covenant, and the replacement of the spiritual leadership of Israel under the New Covenant (the Apostles and their successor bishops leading a ministry of presbyters supported by deacons) from that of the Old Covenant (the Aaronic priesthood, supported by the Levites and led by the chief or high priest) which is what was prophesied by Jesus in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. 

 

Note that “replacement” of this sort took place in Judaism as well.  A parallel error to the one I have been debunking in this note is the error of thinking that what is called Judaism today is the religion of the Old Testament.  This is not the case.  Judaism shares a common history with Christianity before the coming of Christ, but with the coming of Christ the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled and the New Covenant established.  The Gospel was to be preached to the Jews first but many of these did not believe and held on to the religion of the Old Testament.  This was eventually taken away from them when the forces of Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem in AD 70.  The principal elements of the Old Testament religion were the aforementioned Aaronic priesthood, the sacrifices that this priesthood was commanded to offer daily and on special occasions, at first in the Tabernacle, then in the Temple which replaced the Tabernacle and which had to be in a specific place in Jerusalem, and the feasts which by the Mosaic Law had to be celebrated in Jerusalem.   The destruction of the Temple made all that impossible.  The rabbis, originally lay teachers and leaders in late Second Temple Judaism, became the clergy of the new Judaism that arose after the destruction of the Temple.  Synagogue worship, which had developed after the Babylonian Captivity, probably around the time of Ezra himself, elements of which were incorporated into Christianity (the Ministry of the Word portion of the service prior to the Ministry of the Sacrament is largely an adaptation of synagogue worship), took over the central place in the worship of Judaism from Temple worship.  The feasts remained, but obviously they could no longer be kept in strict accordance to the Mosaic Law.  This new Judaism is not, as some Christians mistakenly think, an older parent religion to Christianity, but a younger religion by about forty years.  It too has other Scriptures by which the Scriptures which Jews and Christians have in common are interpreted.  These, consisting of the Mishnah (the codification of what the Second Temple Pharisees called the oral law) and rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah called the Gemara, comprise the Talmud, which was compiled between the third and sixth centuries AD (both in Palestine and Babylon with the Babylonian version which was completed later becoming the authoritative version).  

 

None of this excuses us from our duty to leave peacefully, so far as it depends on us, with all people and to “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32).  It shows the folly in thinking that we are under an obligation to God to support the present state that calls herself Israel in all of her conflicts without taking any consideration of who, if anyone, is in the right in the conflict.  Note that thinking we have to oppose the present state of Israel in all of her conflicts is just as much folly and the kind of folly that is usually attached to the “woke” anti-white bigotry in the kind of academic leftism that Americans think is a form of Marxism created by the infiltration of American higher learning by European Communists but which is actually Americanism taken to its totalitarian extreme.  These conflicts should be evaluated by the standards with which we would judge the conflicts of any other states.  Certainly it is not helpful for Christians to be repeating the inane Scripture-twisting rhetoric of the state of Israel’s leaders that treats the nation that is currently located in the heart of what was King Cyrus’ empire as if it were Amalek.

Musical Conversations

The other week a colleague joked about my “out of date” taste in music.  It was five hundred years old he said.  I found this highly amusing.  I had been listening to the symphonies of Beethoven.  Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was first performed in Vienna in 1800.  His Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the fourth movement of which contains the famous choral setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy and which set nine as the informal upper limit for symphonies for future composers, (1) was first performed in Vienna in 1824.  Each of these, in other words, dates to the century before the last rather than five centuries ago.

 

Unintentionally, however, my friend illustrated the very point that I made in answer to him.  If the difference between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries is that irrelevant then the music in question cannot be tied to the era that produced it in the sense his criticism suggests. Classical music in the broad sense of the term can never be out of date because it is timeless.  This is, indeed, what the term classical implies when used of this kind of music.  This is why it persists as its label despite the potential for confusion (2) even though attempts are periodically made to find another.

 

Classical is not the only kind of music that possesses the quality of timelessness although it has a firmer title on it than any other.  There is a type of music, by contrast, that is notoriously time-bound.   That is the type of music that we usually refer to as pop.

 

Note that while pop is short for popular, pop music and popular music are not the same thing.  Popular music is the traditional complement to classical music.  It covers any kind of music that belongs to the popular or common culture through which a society’s identity is expressed, maintained, and transmitted.  Classical music belongs to the other kind of culture which rather than being inward-focused on group identity is outward-and-upward-focused on external reality and such things as Goodness, Beauty, and Truth.  Both kind of culture are necessary to have civilization and in a healthy society they have a symbiotic relationship in which each informs and draws from the other.

 

If popular music can be described as the music of the natural popular culture of a society, pop music is music that is artificially created and imposed upon the popular cultures of man societies.  While pop is sometimes thought of as one of many genres of music, like jazz, rock, and country, it is something else.  It is what you get when you apply the principles of industrialization - mass-production, mass-marketing, and mass-consumption - to music.  This is why it is dates from the moment it is created like no other kind of music is.  Everything produced and marketed for mass consumption has a shelf-life.  This is called planned obsolescence.  It is an inevitable consequence of mass production.  Unless you are producing something like food which cannot be used without also being used up, you will need to sell to the same customers over and over again, which means that you will either have be constantly redesigning and, at least in theory and the perception of your customers, improving your product or you will have to make an inferior product that wears out and needs to be replaced. The same principle by which automobile manufacturers and software companies operate applies to pop music which is why when you hear pop it you can usually tell the decade and often the very year it was recorded.

 

Timelessness on the one hand and being intentionally dated on the other are not the only ways in which classical and pop are each the antithesis of the other.  This is one of many reasons why the widespread notion that the relationship between the two is that of two different genres is utterly silly.  Neither classical nor pop is a genre, they differ from each other in kind at a far deeper level than that.  That this is so can be seen in the fact that both classical and pop each have their own genres and the nature of the genres of classical is very different from the nature of the genres of pop.

 

Since pop music is not itself a genre of music, but a category defined by how it is made and consumed, its genres are the different kinds of popular music to which the process of producing pop has been applied.  This process could in theory be applied to any kind of music, but some kinds of music are more susceptible to it than others.  Classical music is the most inoculated against it.  The closest thing to a pop version of classical would be something like a greatest hits collection of arias sung by the Three Tenors.  When a previous kind of popular music is turned into pop this creates a distinction between its traditional form and the form that is subsumed under pop as a genre.   The kind of traditional popular music that is most comparable to classical music in terms of musical depth, its extensive repertoire of strictly instrumental pieces, and how it is listened to is easily jazz which some think ought to be classified as classical rather than popular.  There is a pop version of jazz, although traditional jazz purists reject is as being real jazz, and it has a fairly wide reputation for banality. (3)

 

What I just said about traditional jazz purists is, of course, true of purists of any form of traditional popular music.  In the case of country and western music the associations that issue honours and awards have long tried to act as gatekeepers by granting minimal recognition to anyone who was come over to country from pop and shunning those who have gone the other direction in a way that would put the strictest Mennonite sects to shame. (4) These, however, are thinking of the distinction in terms of style and genre.  Although country and western has a traditional form that predates pop music in the sense we are using the expression here, its development from older forms of folk music in the American South was contemporaneous with the earliest phase in the conversion of music into a market product for mass consumption, the rise of radio.  While if you were to spend an hour or so listening to Hank Williams Sr., George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash, Claude King, et al, and then spend the same amount of time listening to whoever currently tops the charts on contemporary country radio, the difference will be obvious and the music of the second half of the experiment will likely sound like it has more in common with whatever is playing on the pop stations, albeit with a twangier sound and sung by somebody who is more likely to be wearing a cowboy outfit, than it does the music of the first half of the experiment.  That having been said, the irony is that those who would appear to us as the traditional country artists in this comparison, themselves for the most part – I think Hank Williams Sr. is the only real exception among the examples given - had their careers entirely in the period in which country music was indistinguishable from pop in terms of being a market commodity.  The C & W gatekeepers, therefore, are not so much traditionalist purists, as those interested in protecting the product of the Nashville brand of the industry from the Los Angeles brand.  

 

There are, of course, plenty of kinds of pop music that do not have traditional forms to contrast with their pop forms because they were created as pop music.  Obvious examples include any kind of music with words like “electro” or “techno” in the designation.  A more interesting case is that of rock music.  Like these later kinds, rock does not have a traditional, pre-pop form, although it has traditional roots in that as with its slightly older immediate predecessor rhythm and blues, older forms of popular music such as blues, jazz, and country were utilized like raw materials in its construction.  Unlike the types of later pop that wear their mechanical artificiality on their sleeves, rock, which when it first appeared as rock ‘n’ roll was largely coextensive with pop, has strove ever since to forge an identity that would distinguish it from pop.  Since rock’s identity both within pop and in the space it has carved for itself outside pop, is that of the voice of the rebellion of the young and ignorant, its non-pop form is not properly thought of as traditional rock but as the very antithesis of the traditional forms of other music that has been popified.

 

One thing that stands out about these different genres of pop music is that while they are quite distinguishable in style they are generally identical in form.  There are exceptions of course, but genres of pop music usually consist entirely of songs (5) which, while they vary in length, hover around a standard average length that not-coincidentally is that which is most accommodating for radio play.  Here is where the huge contrast between the genres of pop and the genres of classical is most evident.

 

Within classical music, genres are distinguished from each other in form as well as style.  Songs, although they may be incorporated into other genres such as arias in opera for example, are but one of many genres and far from the most important.  Other genres include but are far from limited to opera which consists of theatrical productions set to orchestral music in which the dialogue is entirely or almost entirely sung, oratorios such as Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion or Handel’s Messiah which are similar to operas but are not acted out, symphonies which are multi-movement (usually four) pieces composed to be performed by a full orchestra and which may or may not include singing, concertos in which either the orchestra or a smaller musical group provide accompaniment to the lead instrumentalist(s), chamber music which is itself more a genre of genres consisting of various types of pieces written to be performed by smaller instrumental ensembles such as a string quartet, ballets which as a music genre accompany the dances of the same name (Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Nutcracker Suite for example), and incidental music written to be the background accompaniment to an ordinary theatrical play (Mendelssohn’s wrote such music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream twice, his famous “Wedding March” (6) comes from the second version). 

 

It is pop music’s fundamental nature as the music manufactured for mass consumption that both limits it for the most part to a single form, with multiple styles and stamps it with a sell by date.  Since pop comes off incredibly poorly in these comparisons with classical, it is important to review at this point what we are arguing for and against, lest this come across as mere pop bashing.  We began by arguing for the timelessness of classical music against my friend’s dismissal of it as “old”, which led to the observation that pop is the kind of music that is dated out of necessity.  This in turn led to the comparison of how pop genres differ from classical genres, which was made in argument against a widespread but silly idea that pop and classical are themselves two genres or styles.  One of the unfortunate consequences of this silly idea is that it misleads people into thinking that they should seek the same kind of listening experience from both.  Someone who wishes to enjoy both pop and classical, however, needs to understand that they differ at a far more fundamental level than genre and that they are not intended to be listened to in the same way.  Pop music is designed to produce immediate and easy enjoyment.  It is the music of instant gratification that offers pleasure while making no demands.  Classical music requires something of you – the commitment of time, contemplative silence, and effort to actively listen – before it yields its rewards.  Yes, here too, pop comes off poorly in comparison to classical, but remember that the point is that there is nothing preventing you from enjoying both, provided you keep the difference in mind and listen to both accordingly.  A far more devastating comparison would be between pop music and traditional popular music, since pop essentially subverts popular music from doing what it is supposed to do.

 

That however, is a comparison to be explored in depth at another time.  Here I will introduce my third and final argument, by referring to another conversation of about a half a year ago.  I was introduced by another friend to someone he knew from seminary (a different one from the one I had attended).  Somehow the topic of music came up.  I think perhaps that I had been asked what my interests were after having expressed zero interest in any of the varieties of sportsball.  My friend’s friend recounted how when he was in seminary, his professors had warned about the evils of rock music and praised classical, and had then talked him into seeing an opera.  The opera he went to, however, was filled with masonic and occult symbols and basically the sort of thing that his professors, who were there watching and applauding, had warned about in rock music.  Asked if I knew which opera he was talking about, I answered “Die Zauberflöte” and was extremely amused to get the response “No, it was ‘The Magic Flute.’”

 

I did not bother to try and mount an argument about how the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was so inspired that it could elevate the spirit even when attached to subject matter completely unworthy of it as was the case with his last opera in whatever language you render its title.  If he did not already know this from the music itself, he is highly unlikely to learn it from anything I might tell him.  This conversation did, however, provide some insights about notions concerning music that are widespread in certain Christian circles and in expounding those insights I will come around to making that argument.

 

Many evangelical Protestants think that there is this sharp divide between the lyrics that are sung to music and the music itself and that the only thing that a Christian could reasonably object to in any music is the content of the lyrics.  A Christian, according to this way of thinking, and I use that term loosely, can legitimately object to a song that glorifies extramarital sex, violence, drug abuse, rebellion against parental and other lawful authority, crime, and the like, on moral grounds, but if the words are removed, can have no objection to what remains except insofar as it may bring to mind the absent lyrics.  For some evangelicals even this is too “judgemental.” 

 

The origins of this attitude are not difficult to explain since it is obviously a specifically evangelical version of the phenomenon in the wider culture of young people dismissing any criticism of their music from older generation.  The evangelicals who hold this view are responding to what might be called the fundamentalist approach which is to issue broad sweeping condemnations of pretty much every kind of music introduced since the 1950s as the devil’s music.  In the conversation I just related, my interlocutor can be taken as representative of the evangelical attitude and his professors of the fundamentalist.  Those holding the evangelical attitude regard theirs as the more intelligent of the two and speak smugly of those who hold the fundamentalist view.  I have known this to be inevitably the case and could fill the space I have allotted to this essay entirely with examples.  The smugness, I regard as entirely unwarranted.

 

It is easy to be smug about the fundamentalist view.  Sweeping blanket condemnations are difficult to defend intelligently precisely because they avoid making the distinctions that are the mark of intelligent criticism.  The evangelical position, however, is not that the fundamentalist view is too uncritical but rather that it is too critical, too judgmental.  The idea that the lyrics of a song might be objected to on moral grounds, but that the music itself cannot ignores the fact that aesthetic judgement, which evaluates the quality of art, is itself a form of moral criticism.  We don’t often think of it that way, but the standard for traditional aesthetic judgement is beauty, which belongs to the same part of the order of reality as goodness, the basis of moral criticism, and which is arguably goodness itself applied to the area of sensual appearance. (7)  Music, of course, is art made from sound and so is experienced audibly, as opposed to painting, sculpture, and other forms of art that are made to be experienced visually.  The evangelical view requires that such considerations be swept aside entirely and comes close to embracing, at least in the realm of philosophical aesthetics, an extreme subjectivism approaching nihilism that evangelicals, in theory at least, would reject in other realism.

 

What I have dubbed here the evangelical view, although the more conservative of self-described evangelicals sometimes approach what I have called the fundamentalist view, has in a way that is both interesting and revealing, been subjected to practical testing.  The music industry, taking the idea that music that Christians might object to on the grounds of the content of the words can be rendered “Christian” by substituting Christian lyrics – in the case of the group ApologetiX there is an extra dimension of literalness to this description because they basically do what “Weird Al” Yankovic does and substitute their own lyrics to well-known tunes – began producing “Christian” versions of rock, heavy metal, rap and pretty much any other kind of pop music to sell to the niche market of Christian youth.  This is collectively called CCM – Contemporary Christian Music.

 

Note that I used the word “pop” rather than “popular.”  This is because this could only be done with industry-produced music.  It would be absurd to try and create an artificially “Christian” version of traditional popular music because within such music sacred and even Gospel themes always had a natural place integrated with more this-worldly themes.  When, in 1938, Louis Armstrong recorded his jazz orchestration of the spiritual “When the Saints Go Marching In” nobody lifted an eyebrow.  It fit in with the rest of his repertoire naturally and the song has long been a jazz staple.   Indeed, you might find it easier to list the spirituals of this sort that did not become part of the standard jazz repertoire than those that did.  Nor do these comprise the entirety of the sacred element of traditional jazz.

 

Similarly when Hank Williams Sr. wrote and recorded “I Saw the Light” in 1946, it may have conflicted with his lifestyle but certainly not his music.  Indeed, country music would be completely unrecognizable from what it actually is, had Gospel themes not been there all along beside the prison, train, literal cowboy, drinking, pick-up truck, and cheating themes. (8)  Try to imagine Johnny Cash or Dolly Parton without the religious dimension of their music.  Tennessee Ernie Ford would have been almost reduced to a one-hit wonder.  Even today, long after county became largely popified, the biggest hit to date of Blake Shelton, currently married to pop star Gwen Stefani, is his 2019 “God’s Country”, a song about farm life that is packed with references to church, piety, and other similar themes. 

 

We have seen that rock music began within the sphere of pop music as rock ‘n’ roll in the 1950s and then sought to establish a non-pop identity after the fact.   The early rock ‘n’ rollers came from other kinds of music that had a traditional sacred side.  In the case of Elvis Presley, he had strong roots in Gospel music and was indistinguishable from the country artists mentioned in the preceding paragraph in that he continued to sing and record Gospel to the very end of his life.  While he was not absolutely alone in this, he was far from being the norm either for part of rock’s quest to establish its own identity was to jettison the sacred element of the raw materials it drew from and to emphasize the elements that were least congruent with Christian faith.   Therefore, when the first “Christian rock” was made in the late 1960s, in was in accordance with the CCM model of imposing an external Christianity on a music that had become foreign, and in many cases, hostile to Christianity. (9)  The late Sir Roger Scruton wrote:

 

Recent criticism has paid much attention to the words. These often dwell on violence, drugs, sex and rebellion in ways that lyricize the kind of conduct of which fathers and mothers used to disapprove, in the days when disapproval was approved. But these criticisms do not, I think, get to the heart of the matter. Even if every pop song consisted of a setting of Christ’s beatitudes (and there are born-again groups in America - ‘16 Horsepower’ is one of them - that specialize in such things), it would make little or no difference to the effect, which is communicated through the sounds, regardless of what is sung to them. The only thing that is really wrong with the usual lyrics is what is really right about them - namely, that they successfully capture what the music means. (10)

 

What I have argued above concerning traditional popular music, that in it sacred themes traditionally and naturally have their place alongside non-sacred and so do not need to be artificially imposed on it the way it does on mass-produced pop music and on the anti-tradition of rock the way it is in the CCM model, is all the more true of classical music.  Sacred music is the very foundation on which the classical music tradition is built.  Plainsong, the unaccompanied simple melodies to which the liturgy was chanted in the Western Church of the first millennium of which the best known version is Gregorian chant, developed into organum by the addition of a harmonizing voice, which opened the door to more complex forms of polyphony which while it initially met with resistance from Church authorities due to concerns that it would place the text of the liturgy beyond comprehension eventually won acceptance.  The early history of classical music is the history of sacred music and after the Renaissance brought a renewal of interest in themes from pre-Christian antiquity and the Reformation brought about a breach in the external unity of the Western Church, the sacred remained at the heart of the classical tradition.  Mass settings written to accompany the singing of the ordinaries - the unchanging parts - of the Eucharistic liturgy (11) were written by all the major composers including the Lutheran J. S. Bach (Mass in B Minor) and Beethoven who wrote two (Mass in C Major and Missa Solemnis) despite having imbibed the rotten ideas of the so-called Enlightenment.  Oratorios, while usually written to be performed in the concert hall, were largely devoted to religious themes as in the examples already provided to which countless others such as Haydn’s Creation and Beethoven’s Christ on the Mount of Olives could be added.

 

Even more so than with traditional popular music, sacred music is integral to the classical music tradition so as to make the idea of “Christian classical music”, that is, a classical music upon which Christianity has been imposed from the outside, absolutely absurd.  Indeed, with classical, at least traditional as opposed to avant garde, we have the reverse of the situation with pop music and the CCM model.   I don’t know why the fundamentalist professors chose The Magic Flute as the work to introduce their students to classical music with.  BWV 1: Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern (How Beautifully the Morning Star Shines) written for both Palm Sunday and Lady Day which coincided at its first performance or BWV 82: Ich habe genug (I am content), a setting of Dr. Luther’s translation of the Nunc Dimmitis written for Candlemas or any other of Johann Sebastian Bach’s over 200 sacred cantatas would have been a better choice for the point they were trying to make.  Nevertheless, just as Sir Roger Scruton said that it is the usual and not the “Christian” lyrics that express the meaning of pop music, so the nature of classical music, especially in the hands of a true master like Mozart, is such that story and symbolism of his final opera can hardly be said to express its true meaning.

 (1)   More accurately, Gustav Mahler set the limit by claiming the ninth symphony to be cursed to be a composer’s last (as it was in his case as with Beethoven).  Joseph Haydn under whom Beethoven studies composition, wrote 106 symphonies.  “The Jupiter”, the final symphony of Haydn’s contemporary W. A. Mozart, is his 41^st.

(2)   With the subcategory that is called Classical to distinguish it from say the Baroque or the Romantic.  Haydn, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven are the names most associated with Classical proper.

(3)   Think of the kind of music that in popular stereotype  you are likely to hear when put on hold, or waiting in an elevator, or playing in the background in a large semi-fashionable department store of the type that are now mostly obsolete.

(4)  See the discussion of this in Ray Stevens’ memoir, co-written with C. W. “Buddy” Kalb Jr., Ray Stevens’ Nashville (2014).  Although Stevens’ roots are country (he grew up in Clarksdale, Georgia), early in his long career moved to Nashville, and ages ago earned his reputation as the “Clown Prince of Country Music”, his earliest recordings were released as pop.  He was not inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame until 2019.

(5)   A song, as evident from the noun’s etymological relationship with the verb sing, is a short piece in which words are sung.  In a song, the instrumental accompaniment is supposed to back and support the voice.  A song can be sung without accompanying music.  This is called a capella style.  The opposite, where the instrumental part is performed and/or recorded without a voice, is also usually called a song by extension, although it does not technically fit the definition.  Karaoke, in which a machine plays the music and you sing the words yourself, is one reason why this would be done.  Sometimes an ensemble might think a song sounds better without the words and record it that way.  This is quite rare in most forms of pop music because it conflicts with the whole making an idol out of the singer which is part of its modus operandi – think of the talent search shows that conspicuously advertise this in their titles – although it is not uncommon in pop jazz.  Since this is a note and not the body of the essay, I will provide an example that is not relevant at all but which I find amusing. In 1965 Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Band recorded the pop jazz “Spanish Flea” which became a bit hit. It had been written by the group’s percussionist Julius Wechter whose wife had written the lyrics.  The band, however, recorded it as an instrumental piece – at that point in time they rarely recorded any other way.  For a lot of people, their first encounter with the lyrics came in an unusual way. In an early episode of The Simpsons, “The Otto Show” which aired in 1992, Bart and Milhouse attend a concert of the parodic heavy metal band Spinal Tap that had appeared in a number of comedy venues and was featured by the late Rob Reiner in his 1984 mockumentary This is Spinal Tap (Harry Shearer, the voice of numerous Simpsons characters, portrays the bass player).  A riot breaks out but Homer, who had driven the kids to the concert and is waiting in the parking lot, is oblivious to what is going on even though the SWAT team descending on the rioters are visible all around him.  He is sitting in his car singing along to “Spanish Flea”.  That this song would not be likely to drown out a heavy metal concert or a SWAT-suppressed riot is the part of the joke everyone would be expected to get.  There is another part, however, in that while Homer could easily be assumed to be improvising based on the song’s title,  what he sings are the actual lyrics written by Cissy Wechter.

(6)   Mendelssohn’s is the older of the two most recognizable wedding marches.  He wrote his second orchestration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1842.  The other most famous wedding march is the Bridal Chorus from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin which was first performed in 1850.

(7)   For example, an argument for this point could start with the fact that beauty, goodness, and truth are categorized together as transcendentals, the properties of being.  Created being, however, ultimately points to its Creator, which is uncreated Being or God.  Uncreated Being differs from the being of His creation in several ways.  One is in created beings, essence, that which makes a created thing a certain kind of thing rather than a different kind of thing, and existence/being, which establishes a certain thing as a real example of its kind rather than merely the idea of it, are two different things.  In God, however, as our best theologians from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have argued, existence and essence are the same thing.  Another difference is that created beings are finite, uncreated Being is infinite.  These are ultimately, however, the same difference, because infinity cannot be divided, which is the flipside to the fact that no number of finites can be added together to produce infinity.  Expressed theologically, this is the concept of divine simplicity, the indivisibility of God (He has no parts, the three Persons of the Trinity are distinct in Person but are each the whole of the same God not parts which add up to God), which requires that His properties or attributes are themselves not parts of God, but the whole of Him.  In uncreated Being, therefore, Goodness, Beauty, and Truth are each the whole of Being.  While this is not the case in finite, created, being, it has long been the case in philosophy that goodness does double duty, both as the general standard by which judgements of good, bad, better or conversely bad, worse, worst are made, and as a more specific application of that general standard.

(8)  If some of these seem incongruent with the message of the Gospel, remember that in traditional country music these things are treated differently than they are in rock music.  Cheating, for example, is not glorified in country, more often it is avenged, or becomes the excuse for the drinking, which is a possible exception to my point in this note, except that country is generally honest about the self-destroying nature of such behaviour.

(9)   I will say, however, that the song that best expresses what in my opinion is the genuine Christian take on those who have started this insane and unnecessary war in the Persian Gulf that threatens to escalate into a third World War – the president of the country built on the foundation of liberalism, one of the twin evils of Modernity, the other being communism, and the prime minister of the country which many North American Christians with bad theology foolishly think they owe uncritical support to because it shares the name of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament – is one recorded decades ago by a heavy metal band that deliberately forged an opposite-of-Christian image of itself.  The song is Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”, the lyrics of which while credited to the entire band were mostly written by bass player “Geezer” Butler.  The final stanza is the most relevant.  “Day of mercy God is calling/on their knees the war pigs crawling/begging mercy for their sins/Satan laughing spreads his wings”.

(10)                       Sir Roger Scruton, “The Cultural Significance of Pop”, https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/31-understanding-music/175-the-cultural-significance-of-pop

(11)                       These are the Kyrie, the Gloria, the Credo, the Sanctus/Benedictus and the Agnus Dei.